The world-famous email column

Issue #25 – “Life in the Big City” – April 2002

-Well, let’s pick up where Ruminations on College Life leaves off. I’ve graduated college, the summer is over, and I pick up and move to my new home – an apartment in the Gramercy Park section of New York City. Of course it took my roommate Brian and me about two weeks to put together all of the shit we got from IKEA. What’s with IKEA instructions? They’re like hieroglyphics, all pictures and no words. Worse yet, they combine like 19 steps into one. Step 7 is insert screw B into notch F, attach knob G to panel 14, flip over, and repeat 8 times. I’m like, that’s twenty steps! And of course, when it was all done, none of our furniture had drawers. Because everyone knows the drawers are the hardest part to install and they leave them for last so no one has the patience to put them on because they’re so frustrated with the instructions. I’ve got a whole closet full of uninstalled drawers in my apartment right now.

-One question has plagued me since the first time I ever moved anywhere. How the hell does everything get so tangled? I put like a pair of headphones and my cell phone earpiece in the same box and they ended up in a knot so big it would make a Boy Scout proud.

-To me, the hardest part about moving to a new place is figuring out how to work the shower. No one else seems to have a problem with this, but for me, a new shower is a complete mystery. Which knob is hot? Which knob is cold? Should I turn them a lot? A little? Simultaneously? Separately? I’m still experimenting but I think my roommate is starting to wonder why I spend so much time in the bathroom…

-Speaking of showers, I’m just not having a lot of luck in the shower lately. My friend bought me a shower radio. I was psyched. I put it in the shower, it got wet, rusted, and broke. Then I bought a fogless mirror so that I could shave in the shower. First of all, seeing yourself in the mirror while showering is a very unnatural. You’re making all kinds weird hairdos with the shampoo, it’s just strange. Then, one day, out of the blue, the mirror just stopped working. I have never seen a surface fog as fast as this mirror does now. It’s the least fogless mirror ever. I also used to have this little digital watch that I put in the shower because I was trying to cut down on my 25-minute shower times. Trust me, you don’t want a watch in the shower. You start timing different body part wash times and shit. You’re like, “Four minutes for elbows, a new record!” One day I just got too competitive and finally tossed the watch out of the shower. I’ve now decided to stop bringing accessories into the shower with me.

-I’m going to go off on a bit of a tangent here about shaving. I hate shaving. It is one of my least favorite things to do. I also hate it when women complain about having to shave their legs. Are you kidding me? I have to shave my FACE! I literally drag a razor-sharp blade across my jugular! I could die every morning trying to shave. Maybe my problem is that I use two razors to shave. Yup, Sensor Excel for my sideburns and a Mach 3 for the rest of my face. I’m not kidding, I need some kind of naked tool belt that I can wear in the shower to hold all my razors.

-Of course, New York City apartments are pretty tight. In my bathroom, I have to keep all my toiletries on a shelf above the toilet. This gets interesting. About once a week I have to go diving across the room to swat away my floss as its about to fall off the shelf and into the toilet. One time, my electric tooth brush fell off the shelf and my hands were full so I flung my foot out, nipped the brush with my toe, it hit the side of the bowl, and landed safely on the floor. It was one of the greatest bathroom moments of my life.

-Getting back to moving for a moment. You know when you’re moving and you’re in the middle of unpacking and your stuff is scattered everywhere and you just stop for a moment, and it gets really quiet? And then you hear it. BEEP. You don’t pay much attention at first and then… BEEP. Where is it coming from? BEEP, another minute… BEEP. It’s the mystery beep. You know don’t what it is, you don’t know where it is, but it’s somewhere in the mess and it’s driving you crazy – only it’s not frequent enough or loud enough to track. So you start timing the amount of time between beeps. Like that’s gonna help. “Well, it’s 46 seconds between beeps. It must be coming from… the kitchen!” I was plagued by the mystery beep for about a week. And then I found it. The digital watch that I threw out of the shower. Where was it? Buried underneath some uninstalled draws from IKEA. Damn those drawers!

-I had a single all four years of college, so I’ve never really lived with a roommate until now. I noticed that the roommate relationship is very different if the roommates are guys than if they’re girls. If my roommate doesn’t come home one night I think, “Alright, he must be getting some ass!” But if a girl’s roommate doesn’t come home in time for Sex and the City, she calls the police. If you’re a guy and your roommate doesn’t come home for two days, instead of being more worried, you’re more excited like, “Damn, he must be getting some serious ass!”

-My apartment has a doorman. Surprisingly, this does not give me the sense of security I thought it would. This is because my doorman lets people upstairs and then calls me when they are already coming up in the elevator. This doesn’t seem very secure to me. What happens when a burglar comes? The doorman will probably buzz me and say, “Hey Karo, just wanted to let you know you’re about to be robbed. Yeah, he’s in the elevator.”

-Here are some random things I’ve been ruminating about lately…

-I hate having to make an appointment when you don’t really need one. You call the doctor and spend twenty minutes trying to figure out a convenient time for an appointment, and then you get there and they take you in the order that you arrived and you end sitting in the waiting room for an hour reading six-month-old Field & Stream magazines. That pisses me off.

-I find using the ATM to be an amusing experience. You kind of want to shield your pin code from other people but you don’t want to look all paranoid so you do that subtle little elbow move to try to block people from looking. Sometimes, I’ll even pretend like I am going to press the number five but then at the very last second, I’ll actually press four. That really seems to throw people off.

-I find the after-hours ATM centers to be quite awkward. These are the places that you can swipe your card at any time and go into a little building where you can use the ATM. When you’re in there, someone always comes to the door and stands there because their card isn’t swiping right and they can’t get in. So you have to decide in like five seconds whether this person is actually an upstanding citizen whose card isn’t working right or a vicious killer who is going to rob then murder you. Of course, no one wants to be rude, so I end pretty much letting everyone in. But I definitely make sure to do my elbow move so the murderer won’t get my pin # before he kills me!

-I had my appendix taken out the night before New Year’s Eve. You don’t have to tell me how much it sucked. In the past year and a half I’ve had all my wisdom teeth and my appendix removed. All I’ve got left is my tonsils and I think they’re looking to get out too.

-The hospital is a very funny place. You’re sharing a room with a complete stranger and you’ve got on this horrible robe with no back. Everyone is desperately trying to keep these robes shut while they hobble about. You can always tell the patients who have been in the hospital the longest because they don’t care anymore. Ass hanging out, they’re not even trying to keep the robe closed. They’re like, “I’m sick and I’m old and I don’t have a belt. Deal with it.”

-Quote of the Month. Just before my surgery, I asked the nurse if she always works the graveyard shift. Her response: “Son, this is a hospital, we don’t call it the graveyard shift.” Yeah, I guess I never thought of it that way before.

-Have you ever been reading a recipe and the directions are written something like this: “Add three (3) cups of sugar…” Are there people out there that don’t know what the word “three” means?

-Do you think that writing “photos – do not bend” on an envelope really works? You think the postal workers are like, “Hey Jim, did you see this envelope? It says it’s got photos inside. Make sure you don’t bend it, that could be pictures of somebody’s family!”

-What is with all these “intros” and “skits” that are on albums these days? Who are we fooling here? I don’t want to hear that crap. Why does the CD case say you have sixteen songs when there’s only six (6) that have music?

-My cousin just had a baby a few months ago. Objectively speaking, Daniel is the cutest baby of all time. The thing is, though, when your cousin has a baby, you don’t become anything cool like an uncle or something. In fact, now I’m a second cousin. It’s like I got demoted.

-I hate it when people try to be nice and they hold the door open for you when you’re still like fifty feet away and you have to do that little racewalk in order to get to the door faster and you just wish they wouldn’t try to be so nice.

-Why do people answer questions so strangely? I asked this dude that I met where he worked and he was like, “Oh, 30th and Park.” I’m like, I don’t give a shit where your office is located, what company do you work for? Likewise, I asked my friend how long he and his girlfriend had been dating and he was like, “Oh, about twenty months.” What is it a fucking newborn? (No offense to my second cousin of course).

-Why is it that whatever someone else is reading on the subway is always so interesting?

-And, finally, ever since September 11th, New York Firefighters have been recognized for their ridiculous display of courage. But you know why I really admire firefighters? They handle traffic really well. I’ve seen a fire truck with its sirens blaring and its lights flashing like crazy trying to fight its way through Times Square rush hour traffic. But if you look at the firemen in the truck, they’re always so calm and collected, even though they are battling some of the worst drivers in the world just to get to a burning building and risk their lives. Now that’s impressive. I get stuck going below 50 MPH on the Long Island Expressway and I’m banging my head on the steering wheel. Fuck me.